CERESUltra

Music Nerd, Author, Yote!

  • She/they/it

30s/white/tired/coyote/&
Words are my favorite stim toy


kojote
@kojote

I have been consuming a lot of YouTube content about urban legends lately; specifically, urban legends that involve the creation of “fake” folklore, and in particular in particular video games like Killswitch and Polybius. I love this genre of fiction so, so much. It is one of my favorite things ever.

(It is a recurring theme in my stories that there are bits of historical trivia believed to be true within the setting that we as the reader know are not true, or where their veracity is the subject of discussion—the way the wrecks of the purely fictive Norton and Nottoway have settled into myth has been touched on repeatedly in the Cannon Shoals stories)

Which got me wondering: I think I could do that? I am pretty certain that I could, if not create some artifact of historical note that takes off the way Polybius did, at least incept it in such a way that none of you noticed. And I was trying to think: would I? Like. Would that be fun for me, to lie to you all like that? Surely, I wouldn’t find that fun, intentionally adding more misinformation to a world cluttered with it? When I have spent so long here debunking other stories?

And then I thought: haha get over it, you’re a coyote. Of course you would have fun making something up.

So, anyway, here is one attestation, and one promise. Attestation: I have never intentionally misrepresented any of my posts here on any historical or etymological subject. That doesn’t mean I’m right, necessarily, but I have never trolled you, my lovely readers, or made up a citation or quoted someone who doesn’t exist.

Well, hold on.Perhaps I did. I can’t swear that I have never done it, because I do sometimes use that as a rhetorical device. But if so, it was explicit and very obvious. Like, I would’ve said
sometimes a fake etymology can be something like “did you know the word parasol comes from ‘Parisian soldier’ on account of their supposed lack of combat prowess
or
but who knows, because newspapers of the time were always printing shit like CAT LEARNS TO OPERATE STEAM LOCOMOTIVE
Something with that degree of obviousness, anyhow. My point is I have never done so to mislead anyone :P

Promise: if I ever do write some folklore—the more I’ve thought about it the more I’ve thought it would be an awful lot of work—I will never, if called out on it, say “you can’t believe everything you read on the Internet, lol.” I will absolutely never tell you that this was the point of the story, because that is absolutely the most head-ass reason for making shit up and if anyone says that to you, you are allowed to slap them.

You can trust me. I’m a coyote.


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